Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867Quotes
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.
—Francis Bacon, 1625People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850